UDK is Unreal Engine 3 – the complete professional development framework. All the tools you need to create great games, advanced visualizations and detailed 3D simulations. The best tools in the industry are in your hands.
Unreal Engine 3 has been used by game developers, researchers, television studios, machinima directors, artists and students. If you have an idea that needs to be brought to life in a game engine, UDK is for you.
Only UDK has the power, flexibility and track record of Unreal Engine 3. These tools have been proven with countless releases and dozens of awards. There is no better way to make awesome games than with Unreal Engine 3 UDK.
Powered by award-winning Unreal Engine 3 technology, UDK’s feature set is packed with power and ease of use and is used by the world’s best game developers to create outstanding games.
Build better, build faster, build more dynamically.
Build with UDK. Experience the power and potential of Unreal Engine 3. Create amazing games, lifelike scenes and fantastic worlds,and now for free !
The world’s best game engine is now at your fingertips !
Go ahead, make something Unreal !

General

Designed with ease of content creation and programming in mind, with the goal of putting as much power as possible in the hands of artists to develop assets in a visual environment with minimal programmer assistance; and to give programmers a highly modular and extensible framework for building, testing, and shipping games in a wide range of genres.

Source control friendly software architecture, scalable to large teams and multi-platform projects.

Stereo Rendering

Raytracing

Raycasting

Deferred Shading

Render-to-Texture

Fonts

GUI

Pure Rendering Power !

UDK’s multi-threaded rendering system, Gemini, gives you a 64-bit HDR rendering pipeline. The raw power behind UDK’s rendering system will push your creations to new levels. Your work has never seemed as alive as it is with UDK.
The gamma-correct, linear color space renderer provides for immaculate color precision while supporting a wide range of post-processing effects such as motion blur, depth of field, bloom, ambient occlusion and artist-defined materials.

UDK also supports real-time structural analysis for producing destructible environments as well as high-performance texture streaming.

Additionally, UDK’s scalability settings ensure your game will play on a wide range of PC configurations.

Distributed Computing.

Unreal Swarm is a massively scalable job distribution system optimized for high-speed networks of multi-core PCs.
Developed to power UDK’s global illumination solution, Swarm speeds up the process by telling the computer what jobs to do and when to do them. By delegating the workload, it makes the process of global illumination much faster by transparently spreading out applications over your entire network.

SpeedTree Foliage Editor !

Generate virtual foliage in real time using SpeedTree, the award-winning solution for animating wind-blown trees, lush jungles, thick forests and more.
Design just the tree you want, then fill your world with vast numbers of animated, naturally-lit models.

Unreal Matinee injects film-style scenes into your game, enabling you to place every camera, object and explosion within the world and even play it back in real time.
* Movie director-class control over all of the objects in a scene, as well as cameras and cuts.
* Track-based, non-linear style editing system with support for controlling object movement and animation, playing audio, cutting between cameras, toggling particles, field-of-view and much more.
* Easily created key frames for actors and objects, which can be manipulated directly in-editor.
* Post-processing effects such as fades, depth of field, bloom and color filtering effects can be easily animated and fine-tuned for each camera shot.
* Ability to animate interactive, physical objects in the game such as doors and platforms.
* High resolution frame-dumping allows for saving out pre-rendered source images to create cinematics that can be played back offline or converted to a standard video format.
* Robust user interface with support for loop ranges, key/time snapping, playback speed controls, color-coded tracks, automatic key reduction, copy/paste and undo/redo.
* Environment Mapping
* Lens Flares
* Billboarding
* Particle System
* Depth of Field
* Motion Blur
* Sky
* Water
* Fire
* Explosion
* Decals
* Fog
* Weather
* Mirror
* Beautiful effects.

Whether you want fire, smoke, rain or dust, UDK can make it happen with the help of Unreal Cascade, the particle effects system.
Blow stuff up, burn it down, make it rain… UDK enables you to create dynamic particle effects that add life to your game.
* Easily create visual effects for games and cinematics.
* Preview any visual effect in real time exactly as it is seen in the game itself.
* Make dynamic tweaks to an effect such as an explosion or a burning fire without any turnaround time.
* Unreal Cascade interacts with many different systems to create an intuitive, efficient and integrated environment for true creative freedom.
* It’s built around the concept of modules, so adding a new feature is as simple as adding a new module, which drops in and integrates seamlessly with existing functionality.
* Splines
* Patches

Lighting

Per-vertex

Per-pixel

Volumetric

Lightmapping

Radiosity

Gloss maps

Anisotropic

BRDF

Eye-popping Lighting and Shadows !

Illuminate your world with UDK’s advanced lighting and shadowing system, screen space ambient occlusion and Unreal Lightmass, the global illumination solver yielding high-quality static lighting and effects. UDK supports all modern per-pixel lighting and rendering techniques as well as custom, artist-controlled per-material lighting models. UDK features the newest and most advanced lighting and shadow features, including global illumination from Unreal Lightmass. All these features are easily added to your creation through UnrealEd:
* Illuminate.
UDK gives you all the options to perfectly light any scene. Ambient occlusion, per-pixel lighting, fill lighting and fully dynamic specular lighting and reflections are all possible with UE3.
* Unreal Lightmass !
Unreal Lightmass is an advanced global illumination solver. Light your world with a single sun, giving off soft shadows, and let the diffuse interreflection (color bleeding) do the work.

Shadows

Shadow Mapping

Projected planar

Shadow Volume

Detailed Shadows.
Advanced shadowing with support for four techniques:

Dynamic stencil shadow volumes.

Dynamic characters casting dynamic soft shadows.

Ultra high-quality and high-performance pre-computed shadow masks.

Directional light mapping with static shadowing and diffuse normal-mapped lighting. An unlimited number of lights can be pre-computed and stored in a single set of texture maps.

Meshes

Scene Management

General

BSP

Portals

Octrees

Occlusion Culling

PVS

LOD

Animation

Inverse Kinematics

Forward Kinematics

Keyframe Animation

Skeletal Animation

Morphing

Facial Animation

Animation Blending

State-of-the-Art Animation !

The Unreal animation system is a skeletal animation system that gives full control over every detail, every muscle and every bone. Make your world more vibrant and add more personality with detailed animations.

UDK supports up to four bone influences per vertex, allowing for subtle nuances in all your scenes. Full mesh and bone LOD support is also built right into UDK.

The AnimSet Viewer tool will organize your animations and help you browse through your meshes. This gives you the ability to add game-specific notifications at specific points of the animation and allows you to place sockets on bones to be used for attaching objects to the skeleton during gameplay.

Animation is driven by an AnimTree, a tree of animation nodes including:
* Blend controllers, performing an n-way blend between nested animation objects.
* Data-driven controllers, encapsulating motion capture or hand animation data.
* Physics controllers, tying into the rigid body dynamics engine for ragdoll player and NPC animation and physical response to impulses.
* Procedural skeletal controllers, for game features such as having an NPC’s head and eyes track a player walking through the level.
* Inverse Kinematics solver for calculating limb pose based on a goal location (e.g. for foot placement).
* Group animations, handling notifications for the whole group. Synchronize all or a subset of them.
* Morph target animation, allowing the control of morph target blend weights from animation data, with support for material control as well. Morph animation can be authored in Maya and morph data can be exported via ActorX. Skeletal animation can now control vertex and material animation, with preview in the AnimSet Viewer.
* Plus, there are no restrictions on the number of animations playing at the same time, number of blends, or post-processing operations.

FaceFX makes it easy to batch process thousands of WAV files for your game, add expressions to a single animation without ruining the lip-synchronization, tweak an animation to perfection, or integrate the entire solution into your art pipeline.

Every aspect of the FaceFX pipeline is customizable, from speech targets to gesture curves. With direct support for the FBX file format and plug-ins in 3D Studio Max, Maya, XSI, and MotionBuilder, FaceFX interfaces seamlessly with the best tools in the business.

Terrain

Rendering

CLOD

Splatting

Work with a dynamically deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly blended materials. Then layer on procedural weathering, such as grass and vegetation or the snow on mountain peaks.
UDK’s artist-driven terrain system lets you place and customize vegetation, structures and countless points of interest throughout your game world.Terrain in UDK is easy to edit and alter to create compelling levels and worlds.

Terrain building and editing tool.
Uses a dynamically deformable base height map extended by multiple layers of smoothly blended materials including displacement maps, normal maps and arbitrarily complex materials, dynamic LOD-based tessellation and vegetation layers with procedurally-placed meshes.
Terrain is considered an actor in UDK, and therefore its shape is easily controlled via a height map in a paintbrush-like manner. Painting and sculpting geography is a simple task handled with the sweep of the mouse.

Artist-controlled layers of procedural weathering
For example, you can place grass and vegetation on the flat areas of terrain, rock on high slopes and snow atop peaks.
Grass and other foliage can be added either as a material or as decorations called DecoLayers. Materials allow foliage to be instantly added to entire map sections while DecoLayers offer deeper placement control.

Advanced controls over lighting and collision.

Lightmaps, shadowmaps and collision properties can be edited in detail in order to make the terrain look and perform realistically.

Physics

Basic Physics

Collision Detection

Rigid Body

Vehicle Physics

Real World Physics.

UDK’s physics engine is powered by NVIDIA’s PhysX, giving you unparalleled control over character movement, dynamic fluid simulation and even soft body physics. Tweak and modify your physics using the Unreal PhAT visual modeling tool. Impose your will on your world via detailed physics modeling. UDK gives weight to all your creations through its state-of-the-art physics system powered by NVIDIA’s PhysX system:
* Unreal PhAT
Visual physics modeling tool built right into UnrealEd. Build and tweak your physics directly with this in-editor.
* Intense Physics
Rigid bodies, soft bodies, elastics, ragdoll characters and dismemberable objects are directly in your control.
* Animation Blending
Combine physics and animations in new ways by blending existing animations together.
* Vehicle Support
Fully integrated vehicle physics support allows you to easily add vehicles, for use by the player or AI, both solo and online.
* Crowd System
UDK’s flocking technology allows you to simulate crowds of hundreds of characters within a scene.

Destructible Environments !

Build a gorgeous world and then let your players crush it to pieces. UDK’s fracturing tool and runtime enable you to take virtually any existing mesh, slice it up into as many fragments as desired, and destroy structures. UDK supports the destruction of everything from metal to cloth, bringing more realism and interaction to your environment.
UDK’s fracture tool makes it possible to create remarkably interactive, deformable worlds. Easily craft all types of destructible environments and objects that break apart just as you would expect them to in real life.
Splinter walls and floors layer by layer. Blow apart rocky structures chunk by chunk. Add cool physics elements and particle effects. UDK gives you total control over destruction.
Destructible environments enable scene elements to break apart and collapse realistically.

Whether you’re building a photorealistic world or a highly stylized environment, you can make any mesh crumble to pieces with UDK’s structural analysis tool:
* Easily slice static meshes to create fracture meshes.
* Modify chunk size and quantity for desired impact and performance.
* Instantly add fracturable assets by dropping them into your game world.

Networking

Client-Server

Peer-to-Peer

Master Server

Built-in Networking !
UDK currently offers full LAN and direct IP connectivity. Fire up a battle between your buddies and steal the flag from your favorite co-workers!
It provides a flexible, high-level network architecture suitable to many genres of games, as well as simulation projects.

Internet and LAN play support.

Client-server model support for up to 64 players.

Support for non-dedicated listen servers.

Gameplay feature support in network play:
Vehicle-based multiplayer games.
Competitive team games with NPCs or bots.
Co-operative play in single-player focused games.

Auto-downloading and caching content:
User-created maps, bonus packs, complete game mods and more can be downloaded on the fly.

Artificial Intelligence

Pathfinding

Decision Making

Finite State Machines

Scripted

Neural Networks

Give AI-controlled characters increased spatial awareness of the world around them and enable them to make smarter movements with UDK’s gameplay framework and artificial intelligence system. Add life to your game world by using UDK’s crowd system with flocking technology, which can simulate hundreds of characters within a scene in real time.
UDK ’s artificial intelligence system provides two robust systems for AI navigation. UDK supports the automatic creation and use of navigation meshes, giving AI-controlled characters increased spatial awareness of their environment and the ability to make smarter movement decisions.
The UDK Navigation mesh implementation optimizes the performance and memory usage of AI in many scenarios relative to traditional node-based navigation systems, thanks to a more efficient representation and less reliance on collision-detection for movement. UDK also provides an up-to-date implementation of the robust and well-tested node-based navigation system used in Unreal Engine games over the last 12 years.

Navigation mesh system provides an accurate representation of an AI’s traversable space via a connected graph of convex polygons:
* Memory footprint is reduced with the decrease in nodes being stored.
* Less nodes means less time fixing up cross-level pathing information.
* Pathfinding times go down as the density of the graph being searched shrinks.
* Better representation of the world results in better pathing behavior.
* Paths are automatically generated !

Furthermore, you can add crowds of animated characters to a map with UDK’s flocking technology, which directs character movements and animations through a network of crowd destinations and Kismet interaction. UDK’s crowd system gives you complete control over the movement and interaction of crowd agents with players and other NPCs using a "plug-in" behavior system.

Configure game videos quickly and effortlessly with Bink Video, the widely used codec for many of today’s bestselling computer and video games. Bink lets you scale data rate and adjust sound playback for an optimal user experience.
UDK ships with Bink, the slick and accessible video codec used in thousands of computer and video games. A "better-than-DVD" class codec, Bink compresses at higher quality than DVD at up to three times the playback speed. Bink also uses less memory at runtime than other codecs.
Get Bink videos playing in less than an hour, even if your game requires real-time integration with pixel shaders.

Bink supports a wide range of screen resolutions, and mixing audio into Bink videos is a snap:
* Scale data rate and adjust sound playback for an optimal end-user experience.
* Use the Miles Sound System (5.1 or 7.1 multi-channel output), DirectSound, or WaveOut for sound output.
* Benefit from super-fast MMX optimized YUV to RGB converters to 16-bit, 32-bit, and 24-bit RGB.

Tools & Editors

Complete Editing Environment !

Unreal Engine 3 offers a fully integrated editing environment through the renowned Unreal Editor. All of the engine’s key tools are accessible through UnrealEd. The new Unreal Content Browser makes managing assets like meshes, materials, sounds, and animations easier than ever.
Unreal Editor makes it Happen. This WYSIWYG tool allows for content creation at lightning speed. The editor itself is actually a suite of tools designed for realizing your content as quickly and easily as possible. For example, you can test gameplay in one window while you edit content in another.
UnrealEd’s power is readily available and easily accessed. It gives you everything you need to build your world in record time. Its brush-based architectural system lets you create huge environments via drag-and-drop.
* Terrain Editor, a landscape design tool. Supports geometry editing and painting of alpha layers onto terrain to control blending and decoration, collision data and displacement maps.
* Material Editor, an intuitive visual tool for designing materials and shaders.
* Mesh Editor, for previewing meshes and adjusting physics properties. Also includes support for simplification of meshes, generating LODs and texture coordinates and fracturing objects.
* Animation Editors, for configuring skeletal animation behavior, designing complex animation states, and binding them to in-game events such as sounds and script notifications.
* Foliage Editor, based on the tree creation and modeling tools of SpeedTree, for highly customized design of a wide array of trees, plants, flowers, etc.
* Unreal PhAT, the Physics Asset Tool for creating physics rigs for characters and objects (e.g. ragdolls).
* Unreal Cascade, a particle physics and environmental effects editor.
* Unreal Matinee, a powerful tool for authoring in-game cinematics.
* Unreal Kismet, a visual scripting language.
* UI Editor, a style-based designer for user interfaces. Includes built-in support for importing True Type fonts.
* Sound Cue Editor, for sequencing audio events and adjusting sound properties.
* Post-process editor, for chaining together after-effects such as motion blur and depth of field.
* Unreal Content Browser, a powerful Object Browser for organizing game assets of all types, including a robust Content Tagging system.
* Scene Manager, with ample geometry and lighting statistics to help your teams optimize scene complexity and performance.
* Reference Graph viewer, to keep track of your level’s asset dependencies automatically.

Scripting

Powerful Scripting.

UnrealScript is a simple, high-level programming language that gives complete scripting control. Scripts can be connected via Unreal Kismet,an intuitive visual editor that requires no programming knowledge. UnrealScript lets you build prototypes and add new gameplay elements quickly and easily.
These tools allow anyone to create powerful gameplay with virtually limitless control.
* Power
UnrealScript features a built-in compiler and integrated preprocessor. Java and C++ programmers can jump right in to scripting.
* Simplicity
Artists and level designers can string together actions, inputs and events in Unreal Kismet to dictate how the world flows and how the player interacts without having to touch a single line of code.
* Flexibility
Unreal Kismet supports math, conditional logic and event handling to create new script actions.
* Prototyping
Have an interesting idea for a character feature, object type or gameplay mechanic? Use Unreal Kismet to throw it together and test it out.

Licensing

License Name

Price in $US

Source Code Included?

Proprietary

$99.00

No

$99.00 initial cost + 25% of all revenue above $50,000 USD

Proprietary

Free

No

Free for non-commercial use

People

Great engine!

I wouldn't reccomend this to begginer's. If you ahve experience, this is great for you. Just like the previous reviewer if you are an indie developer, this may not be the right engine. When you first start it, it kind of seems hard, but they have video tutorials,documentations, and a whole lot more to get you started and developing. That is why I gave ease of use 5/5. I created a complete game in 2 days. You should really give this a try!

Unreal Development Kit

The Unreal Development kit is THE indie game engine to go to for A-AAA game development.

Features:
Loaded full of award winning plugins out of the box, this is the second most important thing the Unreal Development Kit has above other engines. To list a few important highlights, it has PhysX, SpeedTree, and the industry standard rendering engine of Unreal Engine 3.

Ease of Use:
Though still relatively easy, this is where the engine falls. The reason for this is due to it's project management system. Without the capability to directly start a new project, newbies will find it hard to create a truly unique game.

Stability & Performance:
This is yet another area in which it shines. You will be able to work with it on an Acer 5300 laptop with little to no problems, despite what the requirements page said.

Support:
This is what this engine has over EVERY OTHER ENGINE. The web is littered with help documents and tutorials for the engine, while the official documentation is an effective source for learning the engine.

Fantastic.

An absolutely fantastic game engine for building detailed and advanced games.Very quick to get started with. And there's also the brilliant community built around it.
I was using C4 engine before using UDK,and I will never look back.

not enough words to describe the UDK

In our opinion,the UDK is superior to all other game engines that we have ever used.We feel that it can not just create AAA titles,but AAA+++ titles.
You can make any games with it,not just first person shooters.UDK is the best choice that we have ever made.

not some kind of wussy 3D game engine !

This isn't some wuss 3D program,and it is a fantastic tool to learn about game design.After playing with it for a few weeks and actually learning how to use it, UDK becomes very easy to master.This is the most amazing piece of game technology that has ever been released as freeware ! Thank you Epic !

Great from the beginning until the end.

The UDK game engine is perfect for people who want to concentrate more on making a game look great instead of having to worry about painstaking technical difficulties like in other game engines.Kismet makes things very easy.I have been using this engine for 2 months now,and I have fallen in love with it. The game engine is optimized for creating very large worlds,like in Gears of War (which was also created with this technology).The framerate does not drop significantly even in large game worlds.
If you want to make a real,complete game that looks nice,crisp and next-gen then I suggest you start using UDK.

We could not have wished for a better development software.

First, we could never have wished for a better game engine. The people at Epic are great and highly professional. They are also responsive to newbie questions. We feel that this is a great game engine for newbies and professionals alike. The editor is user-friendly,it can take a newcomer only 1 week to become familiar with the program. We haven't had any problems with the game engine so far.Character animation, particle systems, AI, object interactions,it's all very straight-forward.

My review of the UDK game engine.

1. cost = zero
2. well documented and lots of tutorials
3. big user base
4. UDK has an all in one realtime 3D solution
5. even until today it is still unbeatable !
6. visual scripting saves lots of time

simply the greatest game technology one could wish for

I have previously tried many game libraries(engines) , but UDK is simply the best !
It combines the best of game technologies into one professional and easy to use package. Most game engines have no friendly editors , also you require additional libraries for physics and audio , but with UDK you get all in one pack.You can roll out a good game with UDK in 30 minutes.The workflow is excellent,since all this is under 1 program .
You must definitely try out this powerful next-gen 3D game engine.